Ready Player One—Book/Movie Comparison: Which is Better?

In June of 2010, Ernest Cline sold the rights to publish his debut novel, Ready Player One, in a bidding war to the Crown Publishing Group. It was published on August 16, 2011, and just a year later in 2012, it won two awards, the Alex Award and the 2012 Prometheus Award. Since then, it has become an international bestseller and has been translated into over 20 languages. In fact, designers at a certain VR company, Oculus VR, have been inspired by Cline’s book and the company recommends the book to their new employees. This is just the observable, technical stuff. Is the book that good? And how does it compare to the blockbuster Steven Spielberg movie released on March 29, 2018?

Even though Ernest Cline was a screenwriter of the movie along with Zak Penn, there were so many huge differences that can’t be ignored. Yes, there are some that are understandable, like how they couldn’t buy the rights to use Ultraman in their film, so they used the Iron Giant—which was pretty cool, so I don’t mind at all—but there are others that are just plain stupid. For instance, in the book, Parzival/Wade Watts/Bryce Lynch makes a daring plot to infiltrate IOI headquarters as an indentured servant to somehow take down an impenetrable, magic force field that IOI had placed over the location of the Easter Egg, the prize many people had been searching for for over six years, and he succeeds. He was greatly endangered and barely escaped with his life, since the CEO of IOI wanted to kill him.

However, in the movie, it was the ‘strong female character’, Art3mis/Samantha Cook, who did all the risky stuff. She was the one who risked her life, let herself be captured, and infiltrated IOI as an indent. From there, she was able to take down the force field. Then, her boys on the outside were able to help her escape, but she continued to risk her life by remaining in the IOI building for a while longer, this time as an IOI soldier.

“Han’ll get the shield down. We’ve got to give him more time.”

Yeah, right. Although the epic, climactic feel wasn’t lost, the screenwriters really pushed the envelope on female heroics. That’s probably the most major differentiation from the book.

The challenges were extremely different as well, but that is understandable since the movie would probably be around six hours long if they included all the main events. For instance, in the book there were three keys (Copper, Jade, and Crystal) and three gates of the same. Each key and gate had a riddle that lead to it, and each held their own set of challenges. To get the Copper key—once you even found its hiding place—you had to defeat an AI king at a classic ‘80’s arcade game Joust, and to clear the Copper Gate you had to successfully complete one of the game’s creator—James Halliday—’s favorite movies playing as the main character. The next key and gate was similar. You had to both find the location of the Jade key and solve the challenge presented to you to get it, and the riddle leading to the location of the Jade Gate. There, you would have to undertake more complex trials to clear the gate and get the riddle leading to the Crystal key. Once you obtained that through similar processes, you would be given a clue to the location of the final gate, and ultimately, the Egg itself. The final Gate, in the book, gave three challenges to face.

Yet, in the movie, there were technically only three challenges or puzzles to solve. The first, to get the Copper key, was an epic road race—a distinction that was a semi-improvement because of the sheer scale of it, and the amazing complexity. Other than that first test, the others seemed to be a breeze. The Jade was awarded if you just deciphered a riddle that led you to “save” a NPC of Halliday’s old crush from a bunch of zombies by asking her to dance. For the Crystal key, you had to just figure out which Atari video game was the right one and play it until you found the original Easter egg found inside the game. Then, you won. Just like that. Of course, a crystal gate did appear and you had to insert all of your keys into it, but there were no more challenges after that, not really. Unless you count the test that Halliday placed before the person who actually won (the avatar Parzival) just to make sure the winner had the dead Halliday’s interests at heart.

Based on the points I have given you, which representation of the same general story would you prefer? I leave the decision up to you. I am an avid reader and have been for many years. I naturally gravitate to the book, since it is so well written, but the movie was amazing too, in the sense that the cast was great, the CGI was out of this world, and the filming methods Steven Spielberg used were groundbreaking. The movie itself was worth watching more than once, and since I watched it before I read the book, my first introduction was unbiased and I really enjoyed it. I still carry that viewpoint with me. Some associates of mine who also saw it with had read the book before seeing the movie, so they had gone with an expectation in their minds and were disappointed upon the very first exposure. This was not the case with me, and as a result I enjoyed it much more than they did. However, in my opinion, the book wins by an incredibly short margin. I simply cannot wait for the sequel.